| |||||||||||||
Fedora keeps sendmail — for nowFedora keeps sendmail — for nowPosted Aug 12, 2013 2:21 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)In reply to: Fedora keeps sendmail — for now by cas Parent article: Fedora keeps sendmail — for now
> your one contrived example does not constitute extraordinary proof of an extraordinary claim.
WHAT IS FREAKING 'CONTRIVED' IN THIS EXAMPLE???
I got a Ubuntu 13.04 CD image, installed it in a VM and tried to send an email. I have a bog-standard home Internet connection and I haven't performed anything outstanding at all.
So you're proposing that we keep a _broken_ interface, that is impossible for normal users to configure and that hasn't worked for ages. All in the name of 'unixyness'.
(Log in to post comments)
Fedora keeps sendmail — for now Posted Aug 12, 2013 11:10 UTC (Mon) by cas (subscriber, #52554) [Link]
> WHAT IS FREAKING 'CONTRIVED' IN THIS EXAMPLE???
I have no idea, because I have no idea what you actually did or didn't do. neither do i have any idea how dumb you're pretending to be to prove your point, or how dumb you actually are.
what i do know is that configuring an MTA to do a trivial task like sending an email from a desktop or laptop to an address @gmail.com is NOWHERE NEAR AS DIFFICULT AS YOU ARE PRETENDING IT IS. If it didn't work, it's because you deliberately broke it.
> So you're proposing that we keep a _broken_ interface, that is
it's nowhere near impossible. for simple stuff like you claim to have tried, it's trivial.
any user who finds answering a single question at install-time ("what's your smarthost?") too difficult is going to have *exactly* the same comprehension problem answering the same question for their pretty GUI MUA.
Fedora keeps sendmail — for now Posted Aug 12, 2013 11:12 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
> I have no idea, because I have no idea what you actually did or didn't do.
I described it - I took a stock Ubuntu image, installed it in a VM and tried to send a mail.
What exactly you don't understand?
>any user who finds answering a single question at install-time ("what's your smarthost?")
Fedora keeps sendmail — for now Posted Aug 12, 2013 11:35 UTC (Mon) by cas (subscriber, #52554) [Link]
> What IS a smarthost?
what is a mail server? what is a mail relay? how many facetious questions can you ask in the name of pretending ignorance?
Fedora keeps sendmail — for now Posted Aug 12, 2013 11:47 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Actually, what is a mailserver? Most people simply don't care - they want their systems work reliably and with minimal setup.
You know, fanboys like you is a major factor that'd been limiting Linux desktop for many years.
Fedora keeps sendmail — for now Posted Aug 15, 2013 15:45 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]
Please think before replying.
The default email installation works by looking up an MX record and connecting to port 25 there.
The default firewall of almost every home OR corporate user explicitly blocks port 25 because too many viruses and worms install too many spambots on too many Windows systems with nonexistent or broken security.
Do you NOW understand why installing a standard Unix-style mailer no longer make sense?
Most home users no longer even have a smarthost they could use without SMTP authorization, so even if people knew what a smarthost is (which they typically don't) asking them about that at installation time will not be helpful.
Fedora keeps sendmail — for now Posted Aug 17, 2013 8:04 UTC (Sat) by cas (subscriber, #52554) [Link]
no, there's nothing to understand because you're still pretending that that is an issue that affects *ONLY* an MTA, that MUAs are somehow magically immune.
you are either mistaken or being deliberately deceptive. i'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you just haven't thought it through.
configuring an MTA to use a smarthost/relay/mail-server with authentication is NO MORE DIFFICULT than doing exactly the same thing in an MUA.
Fedora keeps sendmail — for now Posted Aug 17, 2013 11:43 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] configuring an MTA to use a smarthost/relay/mail-server with authentication is NO MORE DIFFICULT than doing exactly the same thing in an MUA. I'm not so sure. Kmail, for example, will probe a SMTP server for the best way to connect, including encryption and authentication. All the user needs to provide is the SMTP server's name and possibly their own user name and password for SMTP AUTH – and they get to put that into a reasonably obvious to find, convenient, and straightforward GUI dialog. It is also easy to maintain different »identities« with their own methods of sending mail to different submission servers, and to select between these when composing a message. Getting an MTA like Sendmail or Postfix to do the same usually involves figuring out which of a set of fairly obscure configuration files to edit, which parameters to tweak in which way, and so on. Normally you get to edit at least two different text files and may even have to remember to run a file through some command-line program in order to put it into the binary database format that the MTA will actually look at. With most MTAs, it is possible to assign different sender addresses their own smart hosts etc., but doing so for a given MTA – even a fairly straightforward one like Postfix – is way more than people will be happy to have to learn just to be able to send e-mail. In a distribution like Debian, the popular MTAs do come with a setup method that lets the installer pick one of a small number of alternatives (directly connected to the Internet/connected via a smart host/local mail only/…) but they fall far short of what is actually required in practice these days. There is ample scope for a user-facing mail configuration method that would collect mail submission information in a way that is not specific to any MUA/MTA, and would support package-specific »backends« that generated appropriate configuration settings for whichever software people are using on any given system.
|
|||||||||||||